The Big Speech Of The Week

There is an obvious opportunity for the president tonight, as he delivers what most of the courtier press in Washington assures me is the latest Most Important Speech Of His Career. This opportunity is not one he has to seek out. It is not one that you need be a political genius to spot. It's right out there in plain sight, on television, and the Republicans are presenting it to him on a platter. The opportunity's name is Rand Paul. There are going to be rwo responses to the president's fifth State Of The Union speech tonight. One of them is going to be the Official Republican Response, given by Marco Rubio, for which (I guarantee you) the Beltway crowd is already familiarizing itself with the location of all the couches in their homes so as to have a soft place to land when they swoon. The other one is going to be from Senator Rand Paul. And that is the opportunity.

Senator Aqua Buddha is a crank. More to the point, he's a crank without the charming crankitude of his father, Crazy Uncle Liberty (!). He's a grim, humorless little drone who is fully convinced of his own superiority and his own immutable destiny. (When, while questioning Hillary Clinton, he began a sentence with, "If I were president...", it was more than a hilarious bit of unmoored hubris. It was a perfect statement of the senator's vision of his place in the world.) Not a syllable of his speech is going to be humble. (No soft-focus talk about his immigrant American Dream saga. That's Rubio's job.) Not a syllable of his speech is going to be concilatory. It's Rand Paul's job to be confrontational and to present the conservative case straight, no chaser. He is not going to be The New Eric Cantor, trotting out Real People to use as props for the same old economic snake-oil. He is the embodiment of that part of conservative politics of which the national Republican party is pretending it is not the vehicle any more.

(Do I think the Rubio-Paul dynamic is a sophisticated good-cop, bad-cop scenario? No, because the Republicans can't control the people who want to hear what Paul has to say any more than the Democrats can.)

The president has a chance tonight to force the Republicans to do for real what they're really only pretending to do now. For all the talk about the wild-assed socialist harangue that the president delivered at the inauguration, it's the Republicans who have spent the last month or so constructing an elaborate performance piece of mock-bipartisanship. They're the ones pretending to move on immigration reform when, in reality, they're only returning to the principles they once championed, before the nuts running around the desert in the camo hijacked the internal Republican politics on the issue. They're the ones pretending to be seriously interested in small-bore compromises on gun control when, in reality, they're simply trying to wait out the political salience of the Newtown massacre. They're the ones who are pretending to jack around with their Base while demanding the president jack around with his. And then Rand Paul is going to get up and bring the voice of the Republican Id. The president should make the Republicans own it.

He doesn't have to be harsh about it, but he should test, sharply, the Republican committment to reforming their party. You want immigration reform? Prove it. You tell me there's room on guns. Vote that way. For all the talk in the courtier press about how the president needs a "Nixon To China" movement -- whereby he adopts the policies of the campaign he crushed in November so as to placate the implacable -- it is the Republicans who are pretending to reform themselves, something I believe is just a holding action as they wait out the 2014 midterms and the beginning of the 2016 presidential cycle. Maybe Marco Rubio can reach out a concilatory hand to Rand Paul and say something about states rights, or nullification, or why we never really needed a Civil Rights Act. Seriously, that's no more or less cracked a notion than the idea that the president should take a whack at Social Security just so the Republicans will continue to pretend that most of the people in their party like brown people.

This may be the last chance he gets to do this. The Republican descent into madness for years was the great uncovered story of the first Obama term. When it finally erupted into public view during the presidential primaries, and when it forced poor Willard Romney to don peckerwood drag to get the nomination, most of the political elites professed themselves shocked by what had happened. They simply hadn't been paying attention. The Republicans had been screaming out for some kind of intervention ever since 2010, when the country elected the strangest Congress in the history of the Republic. Tonight, the president should remind the country of how things came to that state, and of the impact on the country of having one of its twlo political parties tolerate a rising dementia, and he should issue a ringing call for completely partisan mockery. He should demand that Marco Rubio reach across The Aisle to Rand Paul. They are two sides of the same wooden nickel.

Charles P. PierceCharles P Pierce is the author of four books, mostly recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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